Computing devices often utilize a communication network or a series of communication networks to exchange data. Companies and organizations operate computer networks that interconnect a number of computing devices to support computing operations or provide services to other parties. The computing systems may be located in a single geographic location or may be located in multiple, distinct geographic locations (e.g., interconnected via private or public communication networks). For instance, larger data centers or data processing centers may include a number of interconnected computing systems that provide computing resources to customers of the data center. Using virtualization technologies, utilization of data center resources may be increased by configuring a single physical computing device to host one or more computing instances (i.e. virtualized computing devices) that appear to operate as independent computing devices to users of a data center.
A data center may host any number of computing instances in a single physical computing host of a multi-tenant environment. In other words, a virtualization architecture may host applications and data for multiple customers. In a virtualized environment, a “noisy neighbor” is used to describe a computing infrastructure scenario where computing instance that is a co-tenant with other computing instances on a physical computing host monopolizes bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU and other resources of the physical computing host, and may negatively affect performance of other tenants' applications or computing instances. The noisy neighbor effect may result in computing instances or applications that share the infrastructure suffering from uneven computing or network performance.
Noisy neighbors may be avoided by operating in a single-tenant environment. However, this is not feasible for many customers due to cost or other constraints. Artificially restricting resources available to any computing instance may also reduce the potential for noisy neighbors. However, this may leave some customers with insufficient resources to meet the demand for the customers' applications.